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It’s funny how a single word could possess so many meanings. Yesterday while watching Button Poetry (refer to previous post) I came across a poem “Phases”:

They (Kevin Kantor and Sienna Burnett) talk about the different ways in which this simple word is used.

“I’m just going through a phase.”

“The process of waxing an waning.”

You get the gist.

The word I thought I would make meaning of was: SPACE.

With time it has come to mean so many things to me. Earlier when I was at school, all it meant was a physical tangible space.

Then there was the phase when I realised what sadness was and started spacing out. I don’t know how it was for you but I distinctly remember this phase in my life when I started getting sad and depressed and this depression lasted for hours. Maybe it was during puberty maybe later but there was this point when it all changed! That was also when I started ‘Daydreaming’. There are so many instances where I just space/phase out and lose track of what is happening. Daydreaming is just an old hobby of mine. I guess when you have to reach out to a world happier than your present one, there is no other option.

In my relationships with people, we talked about “our space”, the times when we needed space which we would not have to share. Needing space essentially means getting away and taking a break. This particular space also talks about a mental space. What you want is to have that person out of sight, out of mind. Sometimes the other person needed more space, sometimes I did. This was a hard one because someone always suffered.

Then when I came to college, space became this huge thing to be researched about. It is one of those elements of life which you don’t credit as much as it deserves. There was talk of “safe space” – a space where feminists like me could talk about our ideologies.

Safe space also reminds me of the need for a world where I could live the way I want to, without any restrictions and inhibitions. Space becomes such an important factor in your life when you really think about it.

Home. One of the most important spaces of your life. The place where you grow up, learn and then finally leave only to go to another space to make it your home, or a place which looks familiar to it.

And lastly, what I could think of, the space that this blog is, a space on the web, intangible. It’s not physical, not mental but a combination of the two and that makes it so so special.

That’s all that I could come up with, what is your meaning of space? 🙂

I cannot stress this enough but this is one of the best poems I have ever heard and the way he delivers is just breathtaking.

They introduce themselves like this: We seek to showcase the power and diversity of voices in our community. By encouraging and broadcasting the best and brightest performance poets of today, we hope to broaden poetry’s audience, to expand its reach and develop a greater level of cultural appreciation for the art form.

I am so inspired by them, I think I watched about 20 of these videos and trust me it was time well spent. I guarantee you can’t leave without spending at least half an hour. Please do yourself a favour and go watch. 🙂

OCD:

Shrinking Women:

Fantastic Breasts and where to find them:

How I wish someday I could write like them. ❤

OCD:

The first time I saw her…
Everything in my head went quiet.
All the tics, all the constantly refreshing images just disappeared.
When you have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, you don’t really get quiet moments.
Even in bed, I’m thinking:
Did I lock the doors? Yes.
Did I wash my hands? Yes.
Did I lock the doors? Yes.
Did I wash my hands? Yes.
But when I saw her, the only thing I could think about was the hairpin curve of her lips..
Or the eyelash on her cheek—
the eyelash on her cheek—
the eyelash on her cheek.
I knew I had to talk to her.
I asked her out six times in thirty seconds.
She said yes after the third one, but none of them felt right, so I had to keep going.
On our first date, I spent more time organizing my meal by color than I did eating it, or fucking talking to her…
But she loved it.
She loved that I had to kiss her goodbye sixteen times or twenty-four times if it was Wednesday.
She loved that it took me forever to walk home because there are lots of cracks on our sidewalk.
When we moved in together, she said she felt safe, like no one would ever rob us because I definitely locked the door eighteen times.
I’d always watch her mouth when she talked—
when she talked—
when she talked—
when she talked
when she talked;
when she said she loved me, her mouth would curl up at the edges.
At night, she’d lay in bed and watch me turn all the lights off.. And on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off.
She’d close her eyes and imagine that the days and nights were passing in front of her.
Some mornings I’d start kissing her goodbye but she’d just leave cause I was
just making her late for work…
When I stopped in front of a crack in the sidewalk, she just kept walking…
When she said she loved me her mouth was a straight line.
She told me that I was taking up too much of her time.
Last week she started sleeping at her mother’s place.
She told me that she shouldn’t have let me get so attached to her;that this whole thing was a mistake, but…
How can it be a mistake that I don’t have to wash my hands after I touched her?
Love is not a mistake, and it’s killing me that she can run away from this and I just can’t.
I can’t – I can’t go out and find someone new because I always think of her.
Usually, when I obsess over things, I see germs sneaking into my skin.
I see myself crushed by an endless succession of cars…
And she was the first beautiful thing I ever got stuck on.
I want to wake up every morning thinking about the way she holds her steering wheel..
How she turns shower knobs like she’s opening a safe.
How she blows out candles—
blows out candles—
blows out candles—
blows out candles—
blows out candles—
blows out…
Now, I just think about who else is kissing her.
I can’t breathe because he only kisses her once — he doesn’t care if it’s perfect!
I want her back so bad…
I leave the door unlocked.
I leave the lights on.

Tonight feels like the night to read Rumi. I was first introduced to him only recently by a friend and there is no way someone could not love his writing (don’t mind the double negatives). Ever since I read his poetry/verses I keep going back to Kitaabkhana, to the section where his books are and get lost in them. Here are some of his gems. ❤

In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest
Where no one sees you,
But sometimes I do,
And that sight becomes art.

Wow, the search for a the muse comes alive through his lines. Even for me, there is this constant search for inspiration which is only satiated by something like a memory or something that love teaches me on this journey called life. 🙂

This moment that love comes to rest in me,
Many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle’s eye, a turning night of stars.

Just the beauty of how a million things could be housed into a single entity with the power of love.

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
How blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.

Clichéd? But beautiful.

I know a lot must have been lost in translation but then that gives me another thing to do in life. Someday maybe I will learn to read it in its original form. And then I will fall even more in love with him, if that’s possible. 🙂

So these days, every night before I go to sleep, I plug in my earphones and listen to either audiobooks or podcasts on SoundCloud and there was this hilarious podcast I found about Harry Potter which you MUST listen to if you’re a fan. It has been done by the Comedians Cinema Club. So there were discussions, lame puns (which I totally loved), magic on a podcast, etcetra etcetra. It’s a 33 minute long thing and I dozed off midway because it was a tired and depressing day but one thing that I totally loved was the mashup of Harry Potter and Uptown Funk.

The lyrics go like:

LYRICS:
This Wiz, I’m ice cold
Im Voldemort, That white gold
This one, for that H.P.
Says he hates me,
But what can he do?
Caught the kid, boy who lived
Harry’s outta luck
With the Elder wand, stop the chosen one
Maybe make a new horcrux? (Ha!)

Stop!
Wait a minute
Fill my goblet, put some fire in it
Grasp the hands, make the vow
Come on ‘Trix, seal this now!
We takin Diagon, Knockturn, Hogsmede, Anywhere!
If we show up, we gon’ curse out
Badder than that Devil’s Snare (Ha!)

Before we leave
Imma tell Harry Potter a lil’ somethin
Dark Lord Funk you up, Dark Lord Funk you up
Dark Lord Funk you up, Dark Lord Funk you up
I said Dark Lord Funk you up, Dark Lord Funk you up
Dark Lord Funk you up, Dark Lord Funk you up

Come on, curse! Just cast it,
If you got the mark, then blast it
If you’re pureblood, we’ll have it
No need to fear the dark magic!
Come on, curse! Just cast it,
No need to fear the dark magic,
Saturday night and we takin Hogwarts,
Don’t believe me, just watch! (Come on)
Don’t believe me, just watch! (x5)
Hey, Hey, Hey, Oh!

So I was randomly listening to Alt-J on YouTube and I came across this beautiful song: Taro.

Just btw, this is not the official video.

I decided to go to the roots of the inspiration and you won’t believe what I found.

The lyrics go like:

Indochina, Capa jumps Jeep, two feet creep up the road

To photo, to record meat lumps and war,

They advance as does his chance – very yellow white flash.

A violent wrench grips mass, rips light, tears limbs like rags,

Burst so high finally Capa lands,

Mine is a watery pit. Painless with immense distance

From medic from colleague, friend, enemy, foe, him five yards from his leg,

From you Taro.

Do not spray into eyes – I have sprayed you into my eyes.

3:10 pm, Capa pends death, quivers, last rattles, last chokes

All colours and cares glaze to grey, shrivelled and stricken to dots,

Left hand grasps what the body grasps not – le photographe est mort.

3.1415, alive no longer my amour, faded for home May of ‘54

Doors open like arms my love, Painless with a great closeness

To Capa, to Capa Capa dark after nothing, re-united with his leg and with you, Taro.

Do not spray into eyes – I have sprayed you into my eyes.

Hey Taro!

Long story cut short, Gerda Taro was born into a Jewish family that migrated from Galicia to Germany.Taro is regarded as the first female photojournalist to cover the front lines of a war and to die while doing so. She was a war photojournalist in the late 40’s/early 50’s and died in her line of work when a tank collided into the side of a car she was riding on. Gerda’s romantic interest, and colleague, Robert Capa left his Jeep to enter a hostile war zone to take pictures, during the first Indo-China war. He stepped on a landmine however, which blew apart his left leg. He was taken to a medical station where he died with his camera in his hand.

It begins with a photograph. In 1934 a struggling Hungarian photographer, André Friedmann, living in exile in Paris, is commissioned to take publicity pictures for a Swiss life insurance company’s advertising brochure. On the lookout for potential models, he approaches a young Swiss refugee, Ruth Cerf, in a café on the Left Bank and convinces her to pose for him in a Montparnasse park.

Because she does not entirely trust the scruffy young charmer, Ruth brings along her friend Gerta Pohorylle, a petite redhead with a winning smile and a confident manner. So begins the most iconic relationship in the history of photography, and an intertwined and complex story of radical politics, bohemianism and bravery that, in the intervening years, has taken on the shadings of a modern myth.

Together, André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle would change their names and their destiny, becoming Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, the most celebrated visual chroniclers of the Spanish civil war. Together, too, they would change the nature of war photography, reinventing the form in a way that resonates to this day. Capa went on to become the most famous of the two, and arguably the most famous war photographer of the 20th century due to his visceral images of the D-day landings on Omaha Beach in Normandy. His most famous quote would become a dictum by which ensuing generations of war photographers worked: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

This brave, but cavalier, approach to getting pictures of the action from within the action would cost both Gerda Taro and Robert Capa their lives – the former killed on the frontline of the Spanish civil war in 1937; the latter blown up by a land mine in Indochina in 1954. The myth of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro continues apace today with the British publication of a novel called Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes, a Spanish novelist and teacher. The book won the coveted Premio Fernando Lara in Spain on its initial publication in 2009 and has since been translated into 20 languages; the film rights have been bought by Michael Mann, the award-winning director of Heat (1995), The Insider (1999) and Public Enemies (2009). Fortes’s short novel is essentially a historical romance that concentrates on the relationship between Capa and Taro. While the historical settings are accurate, Fortes literally puts words into each of their mouths, imagining conversations, thoughts and debates as well as accentuating both the doomed romance and the reckless bohemianism of the times.

With the Spanish civil war as its main backdrop, the narrative is an uneasy, sometimes awkward, merging of fact and fiction, and will almost certainly offend the many guardians of both Capa and Taro’s reputations just as it will no doubt entrance the mainstream cinema-going audience should it be made into a Hollywood film. “I tried to be very respectful of the facts – the biographical data, the locations etc,” says Fortes when I contact her in Spain, where she is on a book publicity tour. “I went through everything I could find: letters, memories, biographies… But for a novel to breathe, you have to build souls for your characters. This is reflected in the dialogue, the literary tension, the humour, the fights, the passion, the sex, the mixed feelings. In other words, life. That’s part of the novelist’s job. One always writes with one foot on the ground and the other in the air. It is the only way to walk the path.”

However, when I mention the book to Jimmy Fox – veteran photographic historian and erstwhile director of the famous Magnum agency, which Capa co-founded with Henri Cartier-Bresson – he says: “I was dismayed by the novel. It was so fluttery and sugary. I think it is wrong to elevate the romance in that way. Capa was a flamboyant guy, a great drinker and a womaniser who had so many lovers, including Ingrid Bergman. Taro found the love of her life in Ted Allan, the man who was with her when she was fatally wounded. But of course that does not fit the big simplified romantic version so neatly.”

The independent filmmaker Trisha Ziff, who directed The Mexican Suitcase (2010) about the discovery of a hoard of unseen negatives by Capa, Taro and David “Chim” Seymour, concurs. “Waiting for Robert Capa is a fiction based on a romance, but it is also a romance based on a fiction. If it becomes a Hollywood film, the myth will no doubt take over.”

If there is one thing all the experts agree on, it is that nothing was straightforward about Robert Capa and Gerda Taro’s relationship. Shortly after their first meeting, the young André Friedmann was sent to Spain on an assignment for a Berlin-based photo magazine. He subsequently photographed the Holy Week procession in Seville and described the festivities to Gerta Pohorylle in a letter that also mentioned how much he was thinking about her. On his return, he spent the summer holidaying in the south of France with Gerta and her friends. According to Ruth Cerf, quoted in Alex Kershaw’s book Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa, the pair “fell in love in the south of France” despite her suspicion that he was “a rogue and a womaniser”. If the young Gerta was fascinated by his waywardness, he in turn was taken by her independent spirit. “Here was a woman,” writes Kershaw, “who didn’t suffocate him with affection, and who was as unashamed by her sexuality as she was conscious of her outsider status in Paris as a German Jew.” This gets to the heart of the couple’s mutual attraction: their shared radicalism and acute sense of exile. Friedmann had departed his native Hungary for Berlin in 1931 soon after his arrest by the secret police for leftist student activism. In February 1933, aged 19, he had fled Berlin when Hitler assumed power, travelling to Vienna, then back home to Budapest, before departing Hungary for good in September to live in penury in Paris, where he met Pohorylle on that fateful day in 1934.

By then, she too had experienced radical politics, arrest and flight. Born to bourgeois parents in Stuttgart in 1910, Pohorylle joined a young communist organisation and, around the time Friedmann was fleeing Berlin, was distributing anti-Nazi leaflets and putting up communist propaganda posters on walls under cover of darkness. She was arrested by the Nazis on 19 March 1933 and interrogated about a supposed Bolshevik plot to overthrow Hitler.

On her release, she used a fake passport to travel overland to Paris, where she was looked after by a communist network. Both André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle, though still young, were already seasoned activists and exiles when they met, intent on forging new lives for themselves while also staying loyal to their radical leftist roots.

Though Friedmann could seldom afford to buy film and often had to pawn his camera to survive in Paris, he schooled Pohorylle in the rudiments of photography and found her a job in the newly formed Alliance Photo picture agency. And she, it seemed, anchored him – at least for a while. “Without Gerta, André would not have made it,” the late Eva Besnyö, another Hungarian photographer who mixed in the same bohemian circles in Berlin, told Kershaw. “She picked him up, gave him direction. He had never wanted an ordinary life, and so when things didn’t go well, he drank and gambled. He was in a bad way when they met, and maybe without her it would have been the end for him.”

As Friedmann’s photographic career tentatively took off in Paris, his younger brother Cornell joined him, developing the photographs taken by André as well as those of his friends, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David “Chim” Seymour, in a darkened bathroom in a hotel that overlooked the famous Café du Dôme. It was there that the three photographers mingled with philosophers, writers and artists, drinking and dreaming of better times. It was around this time also that André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle became Robert Capa and Gerda Taro in a shared act of self-reinvention that still seems daring today.

The first anyone else heard of Robert Capa was when the couple turned up at the offices of Alliance Photo and announced they had discovered a famous American photographer of that name. The pair soon found they could sell photographs attributed to the fictitious Capa to French photographic agencies for three times the price of Friedmann’s, such was the status accorded visiting American photographers. Their joint ruse was soon discovered, but the pseudonyms remained in place. In her essay for the exhibition catalogue Gerda Taro: Archive, published in 2007, Irme Schaber notes: “Taro and Capa were not merely reacting to their precarious economic situation. They were responding as well to the antisemitism of Germany and the increasing antipathy towards foreigners in France. And to elude the stigma attached to being refugees, they spurned every ethnic or religious label.”

If their joint self-reinvention was the first significant factor in the dramatic trajectory of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, the second was their decision to go together to Spain in 1936 to cover the republican resistance to Franco’s fascist rebels. Like many writers and artists, including George Orwell and André Malraux, they went there out of political conviction and scorned any notion of journalistic detachment. The fight against fascism was, in a very real and personal way, their fight, given their history as exiles and refugees, and the Spanish civil war was the literal and metaphorical frontline of that battle.

It was an adventure, though, that almost ended as soon as it had begun, when the plane hired by the French magazine Vu to take them to Barcelona crash-landed in a field on the outskirts of the city. The pair limped into Barcelona to find scenes of ferment and disorder as anarchist forces took over the city. There, they photographed young republicans leaving Barcelona for the frontlines. Then in September they travelled together to the front themselves, arriving in the village of Cerro Muriano near Córdoba, where they found, and photographed, crowds of villagers fleeing their homes as the fascists rained shells down on the village. In one famous series of pictures, Capa captured Taro crouched, camera in hand, behind a wall beside a republican soldier. In another even more famous picture, perhaps the most well-known war photograph ever, Capa caught a militiaman at the very moment of his death from a sniper’s bullet.

In that split second, the legend of Robert Capa, war photographer, was born, and decades later that same image would become the centre of a debate that still simmers over the ethics and veracity of war photography. In Waiting for Robert Capa, Fortes writes: “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman contained all the drama of Goya’s Third of May 1808 painting, all the rage that Guernica would later show… Its strength, like all symbols, didn’t lie in just the image, but in what it was representing.” Fortes also imagines Taro gently probing Capa for the story of what really happened that day, and him replying: “We were just fooling around, that’s all. Perhaps I complained that everything was far too calm and that there wasn’t anything interesting to photograph. Then some of the men started to run down the slope and I joined in as well. We went up and down the hill several times. We were all feeling good. Laughing. They shot in the air. I took several photographs…”

Though the context of the photograph is still contested, the imagined conversation does describe what probably happened that day just before a Francoist sniper returned fire from across the hills, killing the militiaman who was running down the hill for Capa’s camera. “People want the truth from war photography more than they do from any other kind of photography,” says Jimmy Fox, the Magnum picture editor who has worked with the likes of Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths, “but a flat surface of an image is not the reality and never can be.”

In Spain, Capa soon developed a reputation for taking photographs whatever the risk, setting the tone for war reportage as we now know it. Taro, too, was often seen running across the battle lines with her camera, her bravery matched by her recklessness. She travelled back and forth to the frontlines, shooting what she saw, often driven by a mixture of humanity, political commitment and a shrewd understanding of the power of the photograph to shape public opinion.

Throughout 1937, Taro visited several frontlines, either with Capa or on her own. They managed to return to Paris for a short vacation in July that year, celebrating Bastille Day by dancing in the streets below Sacre Coeur and, according to Schaber, hatching “great plans for the future”. Taro then returned to Spain alone, despite the growing concerns of her friends who, having seen her recent photographs of the fighting, feared for her safety.

Defying a ban on journalists travelling to the front, she once again made her way to Brunete with the Canadian journalist Ted Allan, her close friend, travelling companion and soon-to-be lover. According to Allan’s diaries, written later, they spent “mornings afternoons and evenings together chasing stories… For three or four weeks we were constant companions. And finally, one afternoon, we ended up in her hotel room.” She told Allan: “Capa is my friend, my copain,” and said she might be travelling to China with him. “Nothing was settled,” wrote Allan. “Everything was possible.”

On Sunday 25July, the pair found themselves trapped in a foxhole near Brunete as bombs fell around them relentlessly. Taro kept on photographing, often holding her camera high above her head to capture the carnage. Allan protected her with a film camera as shrapnel and rocks fell around them. Then, as republican troops began pulling out of the area, Taro and Allan ran out of the foxhole and hitched a ride on the running board of a car while the planes continued to strafe the retreating convoy. In the chaos, the car was then rammed by an out-of-control republican tank and the couple were thrown into the dirt. Transported to a nearby field hospital, Taro died from her injuries in the early hours of the following morning. She was 26. The injured Allan did not get to see her again. According to Irene Golden, the nurse who was on duty, her last words were: “Did they take care of my camera?”

Gerda Taro’s funeral in Paris was attended by tens of thousands of mourners, including Capa, Chim and Ted Allan. Orchestrated by the French communist party, which claimed her as one of its own, it became, as Schaber puts it, “a spectacular manifestation of international solidarity with the Spanish republic”. In death, Gerda Taro became a hero. Robert Capa went on to become the most celebrated and mythologised war photographer of the century until he, too, died in action in Indochina in 1954 at the age of 40. “He never talked about her,” says the photographer Ata Kandó in The Mexican Suitcase.

Gerda Taro has now fully emerged from the shadow of Capa as an important photographer in her own right. Many photographs attributed to him – they initially shared the byline CAPA – have now been identified as hers. “She was a pioneering woman both as a photographer and a political activist,” says Ziff. “She was very liberated for her time, putting her work before any more traditional female role. She had reinvented herself – but the Capa myth was so strong that, even when she died, some newspapers described her as Robert Capa’s wife. Their lives were entwined, but she was very much her own woman, and he knew that. They both believed that their photographs could change the world and change the way people think. And their photographs did.”

So today I went to the library to return my books. It was ‘Ignorance’ by Milan Kundera, in case you were wondering. In my last college the librarians were really rude and were always irritated at something or the other. When you asked them to find a book for you, they just sent you to some other person and so on. In this college, it’s sooo much different. Generally, there is a man sitting at the counter who is very pleasant and also talkative. He is the one I usually go to. Today, he wasn’t there. There was a woman instead. I told her I wanted to return the book, she asked me what the genre was and what the title meant. I was taken aback for a moment. I thought for a minute and then told her that how it meant ‘deliberately not knowing something’. She was intrigued. She then asked me to tell the story. I was never any good at verbal communication. I told her what I could. Storytelling is definitely not one of my strong points. Finally, after a conversation of five minutes she let me go. It was a good one too. I began contemplating her life, being a librarian, how amazing it must be. I was reminded of the time when there was a library behind my house when I lived in Bangalore. I could look at the numerous shelves of books through the window at the back of my house. I used to go there and issue books everyday, sometimes three times in a day! The librarian just let me sit there for hours and go through the shelves. It was one of the best times of my life. And then, we shifted to another place. All good things come to an end!

What I was getting at was that I have always wanted to be a librarian, or own a book shop. It would be heavenly, spending your whole day in a library. But I understand that you begin to hate whatever you invest too much time doing. So maybe a part-time job would suffice. And maybe I would sell the book-shop after a while. To quote Jorge Luis Borges: “I have always dreamt that Paradise will be a kind of Library”.

I look back at the Happy Days.
We used to rejoice over the smallest things.
We loved the rain and danced together,
Our laughter echoed with the lightning’s thunder.
Winter came and brought it’s chill.
We snuggled together in our blankets for hours.
Snowflakes formed on the window sill.
Every shape reminded me of us,
so different yet so similar.
Summer came and you took me away,
to all your favourite beaches again,
where on the hammock I would sway.
Finally spring arrived and you looked into my eyes,
I had never seen that expression before.
Though winter had passed,
it had left it’s frost behind.
With a cold heart you said,
that’s as long as our seasons could last.
Now I wish spring had never come so fast.